[This post originally appeared at Lean Left, a general-issues blog KTK also contributes to. The founders of Lean Left graciously allowed me to re-post it here to bring all my health-related posts into one place. Original posting: 4/25/2005]

Thanks to Joe Carter, at evangelical outpost, for an unintentional conservative self-parody. He’s got a solution to the task of reducing unwanted pregnancies. It tells you all you need to know about the anti-choice movement.

There are basically three parts to his post: a claim, in passing, that Democrats do not really care about abortion but are unwilling to restrict it because “abortion is about money”; a modest suggestion as to how to decrease demand for abortion services; and some funky statistics from a funky statistician to the effect that the availability of abortion services actually increases unwanted pregnancies and therefore the need for abortion services - reinforcing his previous policy suggestion. It’s an exercise in logical leapin’ from start to finish, but the middle section is as offensive as anything I’ve heard on this subject. And this from a guy who, however misguided, seems to be a genuinely decent person in most respects. I regard this post as proof that the anti-choice movement is simply incapable of compassion for women even when not being openly malicious. If there’s any question why people who don’t support a woman’s right to abortion should never, ever, be given any authority over women’s lives, this post ought to lay it to rest.

“Abortion is about money”

In America, abortion isn’t merely a political issue; it’s a multi-million dollar industry. Planned Parenthood alone has made nearly half a billion dollars in profit, mainly from providing abortion-related services, in the past eighteen years. The industry is extremely lucrative and lobbies hard to protect their cash cow. Politicians can hide behind the language of “rights” but what it comes down to it, abortion is about money.

It’s hard to imagine what this could mean. The abortion “industry” is tiny compared with healthcare overall, or with almost any other major industry engaged in political lobbying. “Multi-billion dollar”? I don’t know where that figure comes from, but it must include a lot of marginal stuff. With one million abortions per year, and the average cost of an abortion a few hundred dollars, abortion services themselves would be barely a half-billion-dollar industry - and note that truly influential industries like energy, military contracting, auto and aircraft manufacturing, and so on, are led by multiple multi-billion-dollar companies. [Oops] Abortion services are an economic drop in the bucket.

Furthermore, total abortions per year have dropped dramatically, and, thanks to a wave of terrorism enacted by the culture of life, the biggest barrier to abortion is lack of facilities and providers - it’s a strange “industry” that controls Congress and dominates political lobbtying while its own members quit the business. As for Planned Parenthood, they are legally prohibited from lobbying or making political donations. Mother Jones’s list of the top 400 political contributors (2000 data) includes only 15 health-industry donors, only one of them in the top 50, more than half associated with the GOP, none clearly connected to abortion issues.

This claim doesn’t make sense and, given the relative economic clout of this “industry,” can’t be true anyway.

Say’s Law

If the Democratic Party is seriously committed to reducing the number of abortions, though, they should start by paying attention to Say’s law.

According to Say’s law, . . . there can be no demand without supply. . . .

The demand for abortion, of course, has always existed. But when the procedure is illegal and dangerous, the “cost” is higher than most people are willing to pay. Because the supply of illegal abortion services is relatively low, the demand is also kept to a minimal level.

Occasionally, you can catch conservatives coming right out and saying what they think. It’s always disgusting, but always educational. On abortion issues, the revulsion at women’s sexuality, and simple hatred of women - or women who dare to take control of their own health and sex lives - that drives the anti-choice community is never far from the surface. Carefully-crafted propaganda campaigns have been contrived to hide it, but it’s always there and often enough pokes through. The one good thing about this post is to have that revealed so clearly, once again.

The “cost” of lack of abortion rights is that it is “illegal and dangerous.” That’s certainly true. More explicitly, the cost (in addition to the literal monetary cost, much higher than when the legal supply is increased) includes the fear of tens of millions of women who know they have no control over their bodies, the desperation of millions with unwanted pregnancies and no safe alternatives to forced childbirth, the thousands of cases of infection and hemorrhage resulting from unsafe abortion methods and untrained practitioners, the hundreds of deaths per year from the same cause, the manipulation, blackmail, abuse, and sometimes sexual molestation of pregnant women by illegal providers, the destruction of the careers of dedicated physicians providing safe services, and the overall constriction of women’s lives, options, and general freedom as other people demand part of their lives and bodies to control and make decisions for as they, not the women themselves, choose. We might also throw in the millions of forced pregnancies and unwanted children that result, and the millions of life plans derailed or destroyed by unwanted burdens someone else decided to impose.

And what is Joe’s solution? His - apparently serious - policy recommendation in support of making abortion less necessary? To increase these costs! To deliberately embark upon a policy of more intrusion, more oppression, more abuse, more fear, more infection, more death, more forced pregnancies . . ., because the more “illegal and dangerous” abortion is, the worse it will be for women and the less likely they will be to run the risks necessary to control their lives!

It’s hard to react calmly to that, other than to say that it reveals more about Joe than it does about the economics of abortion. And, I say again, Joe is one of the nice guys in the fight to kill women for having sex.

The bright side is that no one is going to take this seriously. But we should all take it seriously as proof of the religious right’s real agenda. Abortion isn’t “about money” - that’s clear. But the anti-abortion movement is “about hating women’s freedom”. How else could they recommend, with a straight face, killing more women as a way to get women to have less sex?

More Abortion = More Sex = More Abortion?

In 1999, the brilliant economist Stephen Levitt wrote a controversial paper on “Legalized Abortion and Crime”* in which he pointed out, almost as an aside, that the evidence fairly strongly suggests that legalization of abortion has substantially increased the number of conceptions:

We know this because studies examining the decline in births in the wake of Roe v. Wade show a drop that is far smaller than the total number of abortions. Thus, Levine, Straiger, et al. (1996) find that legalization is associated with only a roughly 5-10 percent drop in birth rates. One way to reconcile the finding that abortion legalization reduced births by only 5-10 percent with the fact that, in 1975, nearly one out of four pregnancies were terminated by abortion is to posit that legalization substantially increased the number of pregnancies. That is, the insurance that abortion provided against unwanted pregnancy induced more sexual conduct or diminished protections against pregnancy in a way that substantially increased pregnancies. (pg. 10)

Most pro-choice advocates claim that they do not support the use of abortion as a means of birth control. Why then do they support it as a form of pregnancy insurance? If the Democratic Party is serious about keeping abortion “safe, legal, and rare” then they can start by formulating a plan to limit the supply of abortion services. Limiting the supply will increase the “price” and make other options – contraceptive use, abstinence – more attractive.

About this, I’ll only say that Levitt is an interesting character - an economist who makes it his business to spot trends in places other people wouldn’t look (racial discrimination on The Weakest Link; match-fixing in professional sumo wrestling; the economic impact of black parents’ giving their kids unusual names) - who often draws sweeping conclusions from simple correlations. I’m currently reading his book, Freakonomics, which explores many of these issues; it’s an interesting read. The abortion paper is summarized in one chapter. A problem is that the whole book reads like an extended exercise in the correlation = causation fallacy. Levitt can often string together highly suggestive correlations (and occasionally he can substantiate them by, for instance, re-testing the situation after changing the circumstances, but not always), but that is all they are - he almost never dissects the mechanics of the situation to identify what is truly going on.

His conclusions about abortion and crime have met with a lot of criticism; they are not actually born out that well by the data, and the assumption that abortion disproportionately prevents the birth of especially crime-prone children is shaky. In addition, it is significant to me that, in discussing the purported decline in birthrate following Roe v. Wade, the original paper does not note that the Eisenstadt decision, legalizing birth control for all persons, preceded Roe by less than a year - thus the availability of abortion was coincident with the availablity of birth control, but he discusses only abortion as a cause of birthrate-related population change. (The original paper cites Roe over 20 times; it does not mention Eisenstadt or its predecessor Griswold at all, and mentions the possible effect of contraception only in passing, in a single footnote.) It is not clear that the paper’s conclusions about overall pregnancy rates are any firmer than its conclusions about abortion-related birthrates.

Aside from technical issues, however, the question is what significance the paper has for policy-making. The simplest observations are that Joe’s confusion again betrays values incompatible with any accepting stance toward women’s sexuality. Why do pro-choicers “support [abortion] as a form of pregnancy insurance”? Because that’s what it is. The aim of the pro-choice community, unlike the anti-choicers, is not to prevent women from having sex, or to punish them if they do. It is to give them control over the possible outcomes of their sexual activity (and protection against the consequences of the unwanted sexual abuse tens of thousands of them become pregnant by each year). By and large, the pro-choice community regards sex as a good thing, and part of the sphere of privacy and control women are entitled to in regard of their own lives. The purpose of abortion is to increase the extent of that control, and to prevent bad outcomes when they are threatened. We want women to avail themselves of abortion rights when they need to for the same reason we want them to have access to an ER if they break their arm in a car crash, or to have surgery if they get cancer. It’s possible that denying suffering women emergency services or cancer treatment might scare some of them into driving more carefully or reducing risky behaviors, but only the insane or the sadistic would recommend those as policy options.

Joe explicitly notes that there are various options available to reduce the incidence of unwanted pregnancies (contracepion, etc.) - but advocates only one of these: “If the Democratic Party is serious about keeping abortion ’safe, legal, and rare’ then they can start by formulating a plan to limit the supply of abortion services. Limiting the supply will increase the ‘price’ . . . .” Recall that the “price” is jail, abuse, disease, injury, and death - all practical healthcare policy options for women, in the eyes of the anti-choice community.

One could make unwanted pregnancies less common and less dangerous by making abortion legal and ensuring contraception was widely used; Joe opposes abortion and here is silent on contraception, though elsewhwere he has opposed it for the teenage population that is close to the heart of the issue addressed by Levitt. He does advocate deliberately making unwanted pregnancies more dangerous. The intention, then, clearly is not simply to make unwanted pregnancies safer and more controllable - it is to make them more dangerous and unpreventable. The intention, that is, is to punish women for having sex freely and controllably.

What We Needed to Know

I’m disgusted by all this and disappointed by Joe. I wish I could say I were surprised. But again and again we are taught that the central value of the anti-choice community is hatred for women. This is a group for whom - even among its most decent and caring members - the death and misery of women are are ends deliberately to be sought as tools of policy. And it is a group that apparently believes that other people think like this. I doubt Joe expects the Democratic party is going to adopt his proposals, but he apparently thinks they should, or that those proposals would not be insane if anyone did adopt them. There appears to be nothing about the horror of illegal abortions that bothers him; he openly embraces it as a means of deterring women from sex by the threat of suffering or death - outcomes that are, from his perspective, no more than useful means of controlling women’s behavior.

What this means for rational society should be obvious: whatever may be the best policy for reducing unwanted pregnancies, the far right wing hasn’t got a useful clue about it and can’t be trusted to be part of the solution. They hold values that any decent person should be revolted by, and they embrace policies that - when the rationalistic veneer is stripped off - can only be regarded as murderously insane. Without the religious exemption they command and the political pandering they’re given, people who think like this would, literally, be regarded as sociopathic - yet they control the dominant political party and wield political clout absurdly disproportionate to the numbers they mass or the respect they deserve. We have to recognize this for what it is: misogyny literally to the point of the deliberate killing of non-conformist women. It only takes one slip of the disguise to make it clear: let this be that slip, and let us never again imagine there is anything else behind these people or their plans.